Google Proposes Wave as New Apache Project

Google are looking to contribute Google Wave as an Apache project. The initial
contribution for ‘Apache Wave’ will come from the Wave in a Box
project, consisting of a server that hosts and federates waves and
provides a web client, and also from the Wave Federation protocol
for enabling federated collaboration systems. The code base
consists of core code from Google Wave and the “somewhat immature”
integration code forming Wave in a Box. The plan is to move the
codebase from code.google.com and integrate it with the Apache
infrastructure, where new committers will hopefully join the
project and create a new community around the technology. The Wave
Gadget implementation has already been donated to the Apache Shindig
project.

Initial committers include Google employees, in addition to a
number of committers from outside Google, including a few existing
Apache committers.

Wave has had a troubled history. In August, 2010, Google
announced they would
halt development of Google Wave, saying “Wave has taught us a
lot, and we are proud of the team for the ways in which they have
pushed the boundaries of computer science.” Later, Google promised
to expand on the Wave code currently open sourced to create the
Wave in a Box project. “While Wave in a Box will be a
functional application, the future of Wave will be defined by your
contributions. We hope this project will help the Wave developer
community continue to grow and evolve,” said Google, at the
time.

So, are things starting to look up for Wave? When speaking about
the Symbian platform, Matt Assay pointed out that open
sourcing a project isn’t a fix-all solution, and that once a
project has gone into decline it is often too late to open source
it. An active mailing list, plenty of code contributions and rapid
fixes for registered bugs, will all encourage the community to get
involved in a project but, of course, dead mailing lists, bug
tickets that remain open indefinitely and no new code
contributions, will make any sensible developer give a project a
wide berth. If the Wave project proposal is to be believed, then
the project is in a strong position to gain transaction in the
community:

“The development mailing lists are very active indicating wide
community support. We recognize that now is a good time to migrate
to the Apache Foundation while the codebase and community is a
manageable size. Assuming the current momentum continues, we expect
strong growth in the code and community in the near future.”